Wednesday, December 28, 2016

I
recently came into possession of a minor literary curiosity, a copy of the
first volume of The Collected Essays and
Addresses of the Rt Hon Augustine Birrell 1880-1920 published by J M Dent
in 1922. The book was dedicated to the author’s friend “GSC” at Christmas 1922.
A hand-written note in the book states that “GSC” was Goonie Churchill. She was
Winston Churchill’s sister-in-law Gwendoline, who was known in the Churchill
family as Goonie. She married Winston Churchill’s younger brother Jack in 1908.
(Though the note dates the dedication to Christmas 1929.)

Why
should this book be of the slightest interest to me? The reason is that Augustine
Birrell (1850–1933) was a minister in the Liberal government that so
determinedly resisted women’s demand for the vote during the militant suffrage campaign
of 1903 to 1914. Birrell was the Liberal MP for Bristol North between 1906 and
1918, and from 1907 to 1913 he was Chief Secretary for Ireland. He was in
addition a great book collector, a self-confessed “book-hunter from boyhood”. His own library contained
over 10,000 books. He was also an author himself, producing volumes of essays and
literary criticism including two volumes entitled Obiter Dicta (1884 and 1887), as well as an autobiography (Things Past Redress, published posthumously
in 1937). Birrell also had a distinguished career in law, and between 1896 and
1899 was a professor of law at University College London.

A copy of The Collected Essays and Addresses, Volume 1, signed by the author.

As a
Liberal minister, Birrell was a prime target of suffragette militancy. In Bristol,
his talks were frequently interrupted by women’s suffrage campaigners, including
a well-known incident in the Colston Hall on 1 May 1909. During the afternoon suffragettes
Elsie
Howey and Vera Holme managed to get into the Hall and hide in the organ, from
where they interrupted his speech with cries of “Votes for Women” until they
were found by stewards and thrown out. Votes
for Women, the newspaper of the Women’s Social and Political Union,
published a parody of the event by Vera Holme, which ended on an optimistic
note: “It may be that Mr Birrell/Won’t speak in that Hall again,/And it may be
never in Bristol,/Until the vote we gain.”

Augustine Birrell, MP for Bristol North 1906-1918

It
was really too much to hope for. Birrell continued to speak in Bristol, and suffragettes
continued to heckle him. In July 1909 suffragettes leafletted a garden party meeting
at Cook’s Folly, a castellated house in Bristoloverlooking the Avon Gorge. In October that year Ellen Pitman broke through police
barriers around St James’s Parish Hall and ran towards the minister’s car. It
was rumoured that she had intended to throw corrosive at Birrell, which was
vehemently denied by the Bristol WSPU organiser Lillian Dove Willcox. In
December women clung to lamp posts outside one of his meetings and shouted
suffrage slogans. Three women also went to the house where he was staying and
shouted at him through a megaphone.

In
June 1913 there were more protests at Colston Hall, and two women were violently
ejected, while from the gallery a male supporter scattered memorial leaflets of
Emily Wilding Davison, who died after running in front of the King’s horse at
the 4 June Derby. In November 1913 Birrell’s visit to the city was marked by
chemical attacks on letter boxes in the city centre, as well as the destruction
of Begbrook Mansion and a boathouse in Eastville Park by arsonists. At a
meeting in north Bristol a man threw a dead kitten at Birrell crying “torture
that instead of women”. In March 1914 a
letter addressed to Birrell was left at a timber yard in Ashton Gate which was
destroyed by fire.

The
women dogged Birrell’s steps outside Bristol as well. In Southampton in 1907 three
hundred stewards were brought in to keep women protesters out of a meeting at
the Skating Rink. Nevertheless, women did manage to get in and interrupt his
speech. In May 1909 Birrell was in Liverpool to accept his honorary degree from
Liverpool University when the ceremony was interrupted by suffragette Mary
Phillips, who had spent the previous twenty four hours hiding under the
platform in order to make her protest. In November 1910 Birrell took to his bed
after being injured during a suffragette deputation in London, although
Christabel Pankhurst, leader of the WSPU, repudiated the charge that he had
been deliberately attacked by women protesters.

It
is hard not to feel sorry for Birrell. Neither he nor any other politician
could have enjoyed being the butt of suffragette militancy. But many of the
incidents came during particularly difficult years for him. Having lost his first wife after less than a year
of happy marriage, he had married Eleanor Mary Bertha in 1888. She was a help
to him in his political career, and was President of Bristol North Women’s
Liberal Association. In 1911 she was diagnosed with a brain tumour which led to
her insanity, and finally to her death in 1915. Birrell tendered his
resignation as Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1912, but Prime Minister Asquith
refused to accept it. While coping with his wife’s illness, he was compelled to
continue his work in Ireland. Not surprisingly, his personal tragedy affected
his work, and in 1916 he was blamed for the Easter Uprising in Dublin. In 1918
he lost his seat for Bristol North and left politics for ever.

He
continued book collecting and writing, and his work was well regarded in certain
literary circles. The Times obituary (21
November 1933) opined that “his style has a winning and informal quality which
has charmed thousands of readers into a sense of being in the presence of a cheerful,
cultured, but unpedantic man”.

Has this
charm endured? Sadly, not in this reader’s opinion. I found myself very
uncharmed by the contents of the first volume of The Collected Essays and Addresses. With essays on John Milton,
Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson, William Cowper and others it’s practically a
study in the traditional male canon. The only woman writer to get a mention is
Hannah More – “one of the most detestable writers that ever held a pen”, incapable
of “one original thought, one happy phrase”. So much for the feminine
element.

The hand-written note from The Collected Essays and Addresses, Volume 1

Still,
in an attempt to give Birrell the benefit of the doubt I decided to check a few
of his other books to see if perhaps Volume 1 is unusual in this respect. I did
a quick search on Project Gutenberg and looked at:-

In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays – one essay on a woman writer –
Hannah More again.

Obiter
Dicta: Second Series - not a single woman writer, but does contain
the observation “Why
all the English poets, with a barely decent number of exceptions, have been
Cambridge men, has always struck me…‘as extremely curious.’ ”

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

I'm pleased to welcome Jane Davis to the blog today with some highlights from the Historical Fiction panel at this year's Triskele Litfest. In this extract, the panellists discuss creating characters in historical fiction...

At this year’s Triskele Litfest, author Jane Davis chaired a
fascinating discussion on historical fiction. The panellists were Jane
Dixon-Smith(The Better of Two Men, third-century Syria); Orna Ross (Her Secret Rose, the first in a trilogy
about the poet WB Yeats); Radhika Swarup(Where the River Parts, the Partition of
India and Pakistan in 1947); and Alison Morton(Aurelia, a Roman-themed
alternative history thriller). The panellists revealed why they had chosen to write
about their particular eras, and discussed issues around defining historical
fiction, language and setting.

In this extract from Jane’s
transcript of the debate they talk about characterisation:-

Chair:
I want to ask how you go about blending real-life characters with fictional
characters. I’m told that the key advantage of including fictional characters
in a novel that includes real-life figures is the ability to bump them off
without altering history. Would you agree, or do they serve another purpose?
Orna, can I ask you first because I know you’ve done this in Her Secret
Rose.

Orna: Actually, Rosie’s an invented
character but she’s based on a real person. I tried to tell the story in lots
of different ways but because it’s W B Yeats for God’s sake! I was in awe of W
B Yeats, was intimidated until I got Rosie’s voice. I based her on the letters
of a woman who was imprisoned with Maud Gonne for her revolutionary activities,
and her irreverent thoughts, the way that she spoke, allowed me to say what I
liked.

Radhika: My main characters are all
invented and I think they are so key because it allows you to paint such big
key events in Indian and Pakistan history from an intimacy. There’s no other
way to take that canvas and reduce it.

Jane D-S: My narrator was initially
fictional until I realised that he could actually be a character who existed,
so I changed his name to Zabdas, tweaked him a bit, and then carried on from
there. In the books, he is actually meant to be Zenobia’s half-brother, but he
wasn’t Zenobia’s half-brother as far as we know.

Chair:
One of the interesting things about writing historical fiction is that, if the
reader has knowledge of the era, they have the benefit of hindsight, while the
characters in the book don’t. How do you use this to your advantage?

Radhika: A lot of my research comes
from accounts from family members who are approaching their nineties, so I
don’t know with what vividness they remember, but I also used archives and
third party accounts. What I have is evidence from afterwards, whether
Partition was justified or not, so while I will never have the immediacy of
people who lived through Partition, I have the benefit of hindsight.

Jane D-S: Not a lot of people know
about Zenobia so I tend to find that people pick up the books look on-line to
see if she was real and are surprised.

Alison: Historical fiction can
often spark interest in history. Although mine is alternate history, I try to
keep it very Roman in terms of culture and values, but I have had readers come
back to me and say, ‘It’s actually made me go back and re-look at Rome.’

Orna: When you’re interested you do
want other people to share your interest, but I wish I had thought about your
question before I wrote these books because writing about someone who ‘s as
loved and revered as W B Yeats is actually dangerous. I’ve had hate mail. I
stepped into a nest of academics. They own Yeats and they definitely didn’t
like my take on him.

Chair:
I was criticised for a historical novel I wrote where I allowed a main
character to leave her son without showing enough regret, the difficulty being
that it was out of step with the modern mind-set. Today we expect a mother to
put her child before partners, husbands, etc. I wonder how you perceive the
temptation to superimpose contemporary values on historical characters.

Alison: One thing if you’re writing a pure historical novel
is to read the letters and diaries of people, not the historical account, but
what people actually did. I would always go to a source if I could find one
about people and their lives.

Chair: Letters and diaries were your source material, Orna.

Orna: A lot of private writing that has only recently become
public and a lot of writing that only came out of copyright. It’s just seventy
years gone, so I was able to use it.

Radhika: But struggled when I came to the writing. My
protagonist is, for her generation, an extremely feisty woman. She chooses for
her lover, she chooses her husband, but she still has constraints placed on her
by societal conventions. So she has to be courted, she has to be proposed to.
In fact, she doesn’t have to be proposed to. Her father has to be approached by
her suitor.

Jane D-S: Fortunately writing Roman history, it’s turned on
its head from a female point of view. I had the advantage of Zenobia doing
things we would want women to do today. She rode with the men, she did all of
those things that appeals to readers these days. I didn’t have any trouble
trying to pull the story into the modern. It already felt modern anyway.

Orna: When I went back to the writings of women in Ireland
in the 1910s and1920s, I felt like I was meeting myself and my friends on the
page. They had written and done exactly the kind of work that we were doing in
the 1970s and 80s, then it had gone onto a shelf and no one had looked at it
for fifty years. Our generation had to come along as if they had never existed.
The feminists of our time have reclaimed their work and put it out there, but
we have this idea that women’s advancement is up, up, up, that leads to today
when we are supposedly equal. Actually, if you look back you’ll see it’s more up
and down. I’m hoping digital will put an end to that.

Alison: Even when putting women in men’s roles, you still
have to keep within the convention of your story. Like with Zenobia, there are
some things she couldn’t do and some things she could do but didn’t want to do.

Jane Davis is the author of seven
thought-provoking novels. Her debut, Half-truths and White Lies, won the Daily
Mail First Novel Award and was described by Joanne Harris as ‘A story of
secrets, lies, grief and, ultimately, redemption, charmingly handled by this
very promising new writer.’ The Bookseller featured her in their ‘One to Watch’
section. Six further novels have earned her a loyal fan base and comparisons to
more seasoned authors such as Kate Atkinson and Maggie O’Farrell. An Unknown
Woman has been named Self-Published Book of the Year 2016 by Writing Magazine
and the DSJT Charitable Trust. Jane’s favourite description of fiction is
‘made-up truth’. Her historical novels include I Stopped Time and My
Counterfeit Self. She can be also be hired as a tutor, mentor and professional
speaker.

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About Me

I live in Bristol and I write historical fiction and non-fiction. In 2006 I completed an MA in English Literature with the Open University, specialising in eighteenth century literature.
My historical novels are set in the eighteenth century. To date they are: To The Fair Land (2012); and the Dan Foster Mystery Series comprising Bloodie Bones (2015), The Fatal Coin (2017) and The Butcher’s Block (2017). Bloodie Bones was a winner of the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016 and a semi-finalist for the M M Bennetts Historical Fiction Award 2016.
The Bristol Suffragettes (non-fiction), a history of the suffragette campaign in Bristol and the south west which includes a fold-out map and walk, was published in 2013.